Social work ·
Cleft camp 38 — Jamalpur Sadar, with the upazila health complex
41 free procedures over two days · 316 patients screened
- Location
- Jamalpur Sadar upazila health complex
- Duration
- Two days
- Screened
- 316 patients
- Procedures
- 41, free of charge
Draft — not yet reviewed
This account is a working draft and has not been checked by Prof. Papon.
The camp
The thirty-eighth camp in the programme, run with the upazila health complex at Jamalpur Sadar over two days. Three hundred and sixteen patients were screened and forty-one operations performed free of charge, mostly primary cleft lip repairs in children under two.
Screening is the larger part of the work and the part least often reported. Most families who attend do not leave with an operation; they leave with a date, a weight to reach first, or a referral for something that is not a cleft at all.
Follow-up
Operating in an upazila complex is only defensible if someone is there afterwards. Post-operative review was arranged through the complex rather than requiring families to travel to Dhaka, and speech therapy contacts were given to every family whose child had a palate repaired.
The programme commits to two years of follow-up after a repair. That commitment, rather than the number of operations, is what limits how many camps a year the service can honestly run.
More from the practice
- Journal article
Free functional muscle transfer for post-burn elbow contracture: a five-year single-centre series
Khan Papon MRK, Hasan MT, Sultana R · Bangladesh Journal of Plastic Surgery · 12(2):88–97
- Seminar
Building a burn rehabilitation pathway where there is no rehabilitation service
Role: Invited speaker · 14th National Congress of Plastic Surgery, Dhaka